We Will All Write Like AI

Let's take a quick detour into LaTeX. Back in the late '80s, before LaTeX was the standard, there was TeX—a system with no default formatting, which meant everyone had their own unique style for papers. Then LaTeX arrived, and suddenly all our papers looked polished and professional. But the catch was, LaTeX only got you about 80% of the way there. The original manual even mentioned that you needed to add some extra TeX commands to really finish the job. Most of us didn’t bother, though, and soon all our papers had that same uniform look. It was efficient, and it was good enough. Microsoft Word ended up doing the same thing for everyone else—you could tweak it to be different, sure, but most people didn’t. It turns out most of us are just fine with "good enough."

I generally don't like to use large language models to write for me. But I do use them to refine my work, to catch errors or suggest improvements. The thing is, AI likes to take what I write and make it sound smoother, and I often think, "Wow, that really does sound better." But here’s the tricky part: it might be better, but it’s not mine. It’s the AI's voice. And still, if the stakes aren’t too high, sometimes I let the AI’s version slide. That’s the start of a slippery slope. Before you know it, we’re all letting AI make our writing a bit more generic, a bit more uniform. And eventually, we end up writing to match the AI’s preferred style.

For this blog post, I didn’t resist at all. Could you tell this is ChatGPT's style?